About Me

I serve as Senior Pastor of Church of the Palms in Sarasota, Florida. I received my Doctor of Letters from the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies at Drew University. Author of "Take Me to Aslan: C.S. Lewis and the Art of Trusting" and "When the Wind is Against You: Encouragement for When Life Pushes Back" available at Amazom and Kindle.

Monday, December 31, 2012

I recently left a conversation with someone who said she was
resolving in the New Year to lose weight.In the same breath she told me that this was the tenth New Year she’s
made the resolution.She’s made good on
all of them, but somewhere in between each one she has grown, as she said it, “less
resolved”.

We all understand what “less resolved” is all about.It comes about when we place our best
intentions against all the other priorities of life.Something has to give, and usually it’s the
latest good idea.

But would it look any different if instead of resolving to a
thing, we resolved to a person? That is, if this New Year’s
instead of making a resolution to do
something, we resolved instead to follow
someone.To create a new
loyalty.To start a new conversation
with someone whose words might redirect our lives into a new and healthy
pattern?

Could we resolve to follow Jesus?

To do so would put us on the path toward trusting him.You won’t follow someone you don’t
trust.So what if we said tomorrow we
are going to start trusting Jesus more?Accepting that what he says might really be the better way to live.

Think of the Beatitudes, Jesus opening words in the Sermon
on the Mount:Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.Blessed are those who mourn, for
they will be comforted.Blessed are the
meek … blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness … blessed are
the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted.So many of these ways of life are
counterintuitive.We couldn’t imagine
doing them on our own accord.We need to
trust someone that they are actually the right thing to do.

C.S. Lewis in his great essay On Obstinacy in Belief gets to the heart of this when he writes:

In Christianity such
faith is demanded of us; but there are situations in which we demand it of
others. There are times when we can do all that a fellow creature needs if only
he will trust us. In getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a thorn from a
child’s finger, in teaching a boy to swim or rescuing one who can’t, in getting
a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain, the one fatal obstacle
may be their distrust. We are asking them to trust us in the teeth of their
senses, their imagination, and their intelligence. We ask them to believe that
what is painful will relieve their pain and that what looks dangerous is their
only safety. We ask them to accept apparent impossibilities: that moving the
paw farther back into the trap is the way to get it out—that hurting the finger
very much more will stop the finger hurting—that holding on to the only support
within reach is not the way to avoid sinking—that to go higher and on to a more
exposed ledge is the way not to fall. To support all these incredibilia we can rely only on the other party’s
confidence in us—a confidence certainly not based on demonstration, admittedly
shot through with emotion, and perhaps, if we are strangers, resting on nothing
but such assurance as the look of our face and the tone of our voice can
supply, or even, for the dog, on our smell.

While there may be a lot of Jesus we don’t understand, there
is much more of Jesus that we want to trust.Instinctively we know that his way is the way, his truth is the truth,
his life is the life.Yet some of the
things he asks of us seem to go against what, in the short term, is against our
interest.The only thing left to do is
trust.

So let’s make it simple this year.Let our resolutions be not do anything, but
to trust someone.Trust him for how to
live and find the blessedness he’s always had for us.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

I can’t seem to get through an Advent season without
sneaking over to my set of Karl Barth’s Church
Dogmatics and letting the great Reformed theologian assist me in reflecting
upon the great thing God has done for us in Jesus Christ.In all that our world does to siphon away any
miracle and mystery this story has for us, Barth remains the voice of dialectical
sanity: “The man Jesus of Nazareth is not the true Son of God because He was
conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.On the contrary, because He is the true Son
of God and because this is an inconceivable mystery intended to be acknowledged
as such, therefore He is conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin
Mary.And because He is thus conceived
and born, He has to be recognized and acknowledged as the One He is and in the
mystery in which He is the One He is.The mystery does not rest upon the miracle.The miracle rests upon the mystery.The miracle bears witness to the mystery, and
the mystery is attested by the miracle.”

Miracle and mystery.

“Behold!” was what the angel said to the shepherds.It’s King James’ language, and it says so
much.Behold the miracle and the
mystery.Don’t try to explain it.Don’t try to simplify it.Don’t try to reduce it to a pithy poem.Just “behold”.It is both miracle and mystery.It requires no additional commentary. Just
fall on your knees and behold. And in your beholding maybe the Holy Spirit will
have his way with you as he did with the Virgin.Maybe out if it you will conceive something,
or someone, too.